The Simplicity of W. H. Davies

THE AVTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SVPER-TKAMP BY WILLIAn H. DAVIES PREFACE BY BERNARD SHAW NEW YORK ΪΛΟΛΧνίΙ ALFRED A. KNOPF Title Page from Alfred A. Knopf 1917 The Simplicity of W. H. Davies Peter Howarth University of Nottingham "HE HAS no idea of proportion," wrote an exasperated Edward Thomas to his friend Gordon Bottomley in 1906.x Thomas's frustration was with his poetic discovery, W. H. Davies, a one-legged tramp and professional beggar who had paid for the publication of his own poems from his hostel in Southwark in 1905, and sent copies to leading reviewers. One had found its way to Thomas, who was, at first, stunned: He can write commonplace or inaccurate English, but it is also natural to him to write, such as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness and felicity which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds, and where else today shall we find simplicity like this?2 Finding in Davies the Wordsworthian simplicity and compactness he sought for his own writing, Thomas visited him in the doss-house and offered to co-rent with him a little cottage in Kent where they could both get on with their writing. Davies accepted, and the arrangement worked for a while until Davies found simple living in the country a little dull and gradually went back to writing (and, apparently, begging) in London to make ends meet.3 It was an amicable parting: Thomas continued to praise Davies's work highly for its simplicity and naturalness, but, as with his mention of Davies's occasional "commonplace" writing and his comment to Bottomley, he also began to show concern over the inconsistencies inherent in Davies's "natural" output. In a 1908 review, for example , he remarks in Davies "a fresh and unbiased observation" but also a certain naïve egotism, "always neglecting what is not of first-rate importance to himself," which is scarcely an unbiased viewpoint.4 In another review of the same book, Thomas felt Davies's outlook purified the reader from the paraphernalia of modern life: The simple, lucid expression of beauty and joy is a thing to wonder at continually . . . the air they breathe is of such astonishing purity that I could scarcely 155 ELT 46 : 2 2003 endure the stale sight of half the things that met my eyes in the street after reading the book. This man is so right that all the dull, the ugly, the unnecessary things, the advertisements at the railway station and so on, disgusted me as so many obstacles to the life which those verses seem to propose for me.5 But such simplicity then chafed: "his range of ideas is limited," wrote Thomas in 1910, "and he will always be more pleased than his readers with variation upon 'God made the country and man made the town.'" Attempting to explain (to himself, perhaps) how Davies can be simultaneously so delightful and so irritating, Thomas then insists that in fact, Davies's weaknesses are ultimately reassuring, because they mean that "Mr Davies's good things come of just that inexplicable unconscious simplicity which used to be called inspiration."6 In other words, Davies's bad moments—his lack of proportion—only confirm the true simplicity of his good poems. A tacit but important shift of terms has taken place here. Simplicity is no longer seen as an effect of the purity of the author's personality, because Davies writes bad poetry too. Rather, simplicity is something which depends on the incongruity or disproportion between various elements in Davies's work; it is more visible to the reader than the poet himself. Simplicity is no longer a question of simple content or simple vision —Davies is not simple because he writes about sheep and cows simply —but an affair of incompatible approaches and lack of proportion which occur despite the poet's conscious intention. Simplicity is something underwritten by dissonance and despite the intentional personality of its author. This redefinition of simplicity has a much wider relevance than just to Davies. For writing simply, without rhetoric or pose, was not only what...